What’s the Moral Price for Playing Politics?
Antigay policies can be attributed to populist, even democratic, politics, but that does not absolve their perpetrators of bigotry.
I had never heard of California state Sen. Roy Ashburn before he made headlines earlier this month by getting arrested for driving while intoxicated after leaving a gay bar in Sacramento. But even though his name was not well known, there was something awfully familiar about his situation: a closeted Republican who made his mark opposing gay-friendly legislation suddenly outs himself, accidently, with some foolish public act. To his credit, Ashburn, quickly came clean. He apologized and took responsibility for the incident. A few days later, in an interview with a sympathetic and supportive conservative radio host, he announced he was gay and asked listeners to pray for him.
His votes, explained Ashburn, reflected his "duty to represent my constituents," the vast majority of whom, in his opinion, were against various rights for gays. Left unasked and unanswered was the natural follow-up: at what point does catering to a presumably bigoted constituency (particularly by one who belongs to a group that is the object of that bigotry) become not just hypocritical but downright immoral? The question, of course, is not just one for Ashburn, but for politicians everywhere who seek political gain from advocating discrimination.
For most human-rights advocates, the answer is obvious (at that point where bias trumps both logic and compassion), which is one reason a measure before the Ugandan Parliament has been condemned around the world. The proposed law, supposedly designed to protect Ugandan culture, its vulnerable children, and "traditional family values," would harden the country's already tough laws against homosexuality. It sanctions life imprisonment for those who engage in same-sex marriage or for anyone who touches another person with the intention of "committing the act of homosexuality." It allows executing those who engage in homosexual acts with certain classes of victims. And it would jail those who encourage or counsel others who engage in homosexuality.
The Ugandan proposal (which few expect to pass in anything like its present form and which, interestingly enough, was undergirded by arguments from certain American evangelicals) is so over the top that no serious thinker believes it to be remotely enforceable. Also—according to a brief filed by the London-based Equal Rights Trust—it violates both the Ugandan Constitution and the country's obligations under various international agreements.
Dimitrina Petrova, executive director and founder of Equal Rights Trust, believes the timing of the proposed legislation is suspect. "Homosexuality has been around in African cultures for centuries, as well as in non-African cultures," she told me. "Why now, given that homosexuality is already prohibited?" The answer, she says, is politics. "At this time when Uganda has a number of political problems and insecurities … poverty is horrible, security is horrible, sexual crime in unaddressed … the focus on the issue of homosexuality is a way of distracting attention from the real problems of the country."
In a brave and powerful speech delivered in Uganda, Sylvia Tamale made much the same point. Homosexuals had nothing to do with the country's serious economic or medical problems, pointed out. Tamale, dean of the Makerere University law school in Kampala. Yet anyone "who cares to read history books knows very well that in times of crisis, when people at the locus of power are feeling vulnerable and their power is being threatened, they will turn against the weaker groups in society. They will pick out a weak voiceless group on whom to heap blame for all society's troubles."
Uganda's leaders, Tamale noted, had a long history of scapegoating vulnerable populations. "Dictator Idi Amin blamed Asians for Uganda's dire economic problems and expelled all Indians in the early 1970s." Former president Milton Obote's demonized refugees. "The lesson drawn from these chapters in our recent history," Tamale said, "is that today it is homosexuals under attack; tomorrow it will be another exaggerated minority."
When I asked Petrova her view of the future globally for gays and other sexual minorities, she reflected on the year that had just passed: "Consider in the second half of 2009. There were two days, two very different days … The second of July 2009, the Delhi high court decriminalized homosexuality in India; on 14th of October … the absurd antisexuality bill was introduced in the Parliament of Uganda … I personally think that what will be happening more and more is something of the nature of what happened in India."
Petrova is probably right. Blatant discrimination is becoming less and less acceptable in more and more places. But as Professor Tamale makes clear, we are far from a world in which the rights of the vulnerable can be taken for granted. Scapegoating will always serve someone's political interests. Still, however much you gain in the short term by pandering to prejudice, the shredding of one's country—or one's soul—is an awfully high price to pay.
Ellis Cose is the author of Bone to Pick: Of Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation, and Revenge and The Envy of the World: On Being a Black Man in America.
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Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
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